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The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

Book by Stephen Greenblatt · 12 quotes · Books, Pleasure, Poggio

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The Swerve: How the World Became Modern Quotes

“A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure - an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation - characterizes Montaigne's restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes's chronicle of his mad knight, Michelangelo's depiction of flayed skin, Leonardo's sketches of whirlpools, Caravaggio's loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ's feet.”

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“In his case, the decisive factor was the study of Ancient Greek, made possible when in 1397 Salutati invited the preeminent Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysolaras to reside in Florence and give classes in a language that had been almost completely forgotten. "At the coming of Chrysoloras," Bruni later recalled, "I was made to halt in my choice of lives, seeing that I held it wrong to desert law, and yet I reckoned it a crime to omit so great an occasion of learning the Greek literature." The lure proved irresistible: "Conquered at last by these reasonings, I delivered myself over to Chrysolaras with such passion that what I had received from him by day in hours of waking, occupied my mind at night in hours of sleep.”

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“There was a time in the ancient world - a very long time - in which the central cultural problem must have seemed an inexhaustible outpouring of books. Where to put them all? How to organize them on the groaning shelves? How to hold the profusion of knowledge in one's head? The loss of this plenitude would have been virtually inconceivable to anyone living in its midst. Then, not all at once but with the cumulative force of a mass extinction, the whole enterprise came to an end. What looked stable turned out to be fragile, and what had seemed for all time was only for the time being.”

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“The fate of the books and all their vast numbers, is epitomized in the greatest library in the ancient world, a library located not in Italy but in Alexandria, the capital of Egypt and the commercial hub of the Eastern Mediterranean. The city had many tourist attractions, including an impressive theater and red light district. But visitors always took note of something quite exceptional, in the center of the city, at the lavish site known as "the museum" most of the intellectual inherits of Greek, Latin, Babylonian, Egyptian and Jewish cultures ad been assembled at enormous costs and carefully archived for researched. Starting as early as 300BCE, the Ptolemaic Kings who ruled Alexandria had the inspired idea of luring leading scholars, scientists and poets to their city by offering them life appointments at their museum...The recipients of this largess established remarkably high intellectual standards. Euclid developed his geometry in Alexandria, Archimedes discovered Pi and laid the foundation of calculus.”

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“The quintessential emblem of religion — and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core — is the sacrifice of a child by a parent. Almost all religious faiths incorporate the myth of such a sacrifice, and some have actually made it real. Lucretius had in mind the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father Agamemnon, but he may also have been aware of the Jewish story of Abraham and Isaac and other comparable Near Eastern stories for which the Romans of his times had a growing taste. Writing around 50 BCE he could not, of course, have anticipated the great sacrifice myth that would come to dominate the Western world, but he would not have been surprised by it or by the endlessly reiterated, prominently displayed images of the bloody, murdered son.”

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“That freedom, the plunging back into the ancient past, appears always to have heightened his alienation from the present. To sure his love for classical Latin didn't lead him to idealize, as some of his contemporaries did Ancient Roman history, Poggio understand that history had it's full measure of full folly and wickedness. But he was aware that the city in which he lived was a pathetic shadow of it's past glory.”

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“Freedom here has nothing to do with political liberty, or a notion of rights, or the license to say whatever he wished, or the ability to go wherever he chose. It's rather the experience of withdrawing inwardly from the press of the wold, in which he himself was so ambitiously engaged. And in sphering himself in a space apart. For Poggio that experience was what it meant to immerse himself in ancient book. "I am free for reading.”

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